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Monday, August 16, 2010

notes: typed vs. handwritten

Kelly asks whether she'd be at a disadvantage taking notes by hand as compared to a laptop. it's hard for me to conclusively say...i saw people who did it both ways in class. there didn't seem to be a noticeable correlation between how typists did and how hand-writers did. i always did it on a laptop, because i'm a ridiculously slow hand-writer but a pretty fast typist.

if your biggest worry is about getting distracted with how they're formatted, that's really not a big deal. you'll get the hang of it in the first week or so, and then you won't even think about it anymore. make sure you know how the bullet-point features on your word processor of choice work, and you should be good to go.

one more argument against handwriting them and typing them later, though...are you really going to take the time to recopy all your notes? will that really be the best use of your time? depending on your work ethic and the way you study, the answer to that may be yes. but, think about that. i knew i would never do such a thing on a regular basis...and also, liked having the already-typed notes to condense and edit into an outline come finals week.

4 comments:

Thanks for the answer! I appreciate the input of someone who has been through the experience. I was thinking the retyping process would be good review. I did it all throughout undergrad and it worked well. I think I will try using just the laptop the first day though and see how it goes.

Other perspectives

This blog is almost exclusively pro-law school. Sure, some of us complain about one thing or another in various posts, but the authors of this blog generally didn't view law school as the biggest mistake of his or her life. Well, except for Nicolle who writes eloquently about the issue here.

However:Law school is far more expensive than just the tuition. It is not the fast track to fame and glory and high salaries for all but the very few, and the current market has caused that number to dwindle.